


Terror of the South

by ectotherm



Category: Apothecia (Webcomic)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Gen, Horror, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-15 08:44:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13027425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ectotherm/pseuds/ectotherm
Summary: Nineteen years and one day later.





	Terror of the South

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Burning_Nightingale](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Burning_Nightingale/gifts).



> I really love this webcomic, so thank you for the opportunity to write these characters! Have a good Yuletide!
> 
> Warnings for mind control, animal death, brief suicidal ideation, similarly brief vomiting, and canon-level blood, guts and body horror. 
> 
> The t-shirt is a real shirt which you can buy at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
> 
> Thanks M for the beta!

“Oh god,” were, perhaps predictably, the first words Jessie spoke when the sun rose. She didn’t stop there. “Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god,” she intoned. She had fallen asleep on the hardwood of the lounge room floor, not in her childhood bed. One of her arms was numb, and her entire side ached. A swarm of flies sang a droning tune beside her, dancing over the bloody, sprawled remains of a wild rabbit. 

Sitting up, she pressed cool fingertips against her eyelids, swallowing as she remembered the last few sickly moments of lucidity before the alien had taken control of her body the night before. What had happened next was a blur, not gone from her, but smeared in her memory like oil over glass. She had been outside, joyous, ravenous, plunging filaments into the earth to tear burrows apart, growing, glowing, exploring, expanding—she shook herself.

She could still feel the alien hyphae rambling through her. Glancing down, she saw swathes of her skin interrupted by wet mildew and slimy horned fruits. She looked away, her heart pounding. 

She thought it might be easier to inspect the damage by touch, like a palm on a forehead to check for fever. Instead her hand hovered, uncooperative, several inches from the affected skin which, with a wince from Jessie, began to speak as it had yesterday. 

GOOD MORNING, JESSIE ME.

Dizzy, she shuddered, once, twice, caught a whiff of the fleshy smell of the rabbit, remembered the feeling of its warmth oozing against her teeth, then doubled over and threw up.

THIS SYMBIOSIS IS WORK-REQUIRING.

“How’s that?” Jessie asked, voice raw in her throat. She wiped at her mouth.

WE HUNGER. WE EAT. YOU UN-EAT. WE WILL HUNGER. WE WILL EAT. YOU WILL UN-EAT. MOST UNPRODUCTIVE. 

Jessie ignored this, standing up. Her clothes were a wreck. Dirt and blood decorated her military-issue trousers. Her shirt still lay discarded on the floor where she had tossed it last night. Something unidentifiable—but almost certainly biological—had grown across the side of her sports bra, welding the garment to her changed skin. A yellow eye blinked from her fungus-marred chest. She looked away. 

“New clothes,” she said to herself, although uncomfortably aware of her audience. She kicked off her boots and trousers, dropping each unceremoniously onto the dust and grime of the long-unused floor of the house, like a creature shedding its skin. 

Reaching her parents’ bedroom, she hesitated at the closed door. Visions of their decayed bodies lying in the double bed reared, threatening her with _what if_ , with the possibility of stepping into the room to find just that. She shook herself. They would have left as soon as the reports started flooding every radio and television channel. Granted, the house was so close to ground zero that they wouldn’t have gotten far—certainly not as far as Jessie—but they would have left. 

Indeed, the door swung open to an empty, disused room, every surface from the curtains to the patchwork quilt on the bed blanketed in dust. She was alone. She was decidedly _not alone_.

“How did you escape?” She was no more in the mood for pleasantries than she had been yesterday, or twenty years ago. 

WE.

“We what?” 

WE. YOU. ME. ONE THING. HYBRID THING. JESSIE SPORE. SPORE JESSIE. WE ESCAPE. 

Jessie felt sick, again. She chose not to respond to this, opening her parents’ wardrobe instead. She was loath to wear anything of her mother’s, but her own clothes in the house would certainly be too small. She swept her hands past the work uniforms, all white polyester and delicate silver buttons, and past the ‘good occasion dresses’, which were as dusty as anything else in the wardrobe, but more unremarkable for the fact, since Jessie could not remember a single time her mother had worn them. 

She selected a black t-shirt and pulled it over her head, wincing as it caught on some part of the alien hitchhiker that had taken residence on her skin. _Terror of the South_ , the t-shirt proclaimed. An _Acrocanthosaurus_ skeleton grinned on the fabric. There were a handful of these kinds of shirts in the wardrobe; most were mementos of vacations taken in beautiful places where all her parents had really wanted to do was visit the nearest museum. 

THIS PETRI DISH YOU NAME HOME IS YET ANOTHER PRISON TANK. 

Again she said nothing, but for the first time, it was the silence of agreement. She grabbed the first pair of jeans she could see and closed the wardrobe before she could glimpse herself in the mirror. 

One hundred thousand people. Dead by her hands. She didn’t want to look at herself. 

FREE ME. 

KILL ME.

She wasn’t sure if the words had come from the alien or her head. She moved quickly back through the house, as if she could escape her thoughts by leaving it, only pausing to retrieve her boots from the lounge before sitting heavily down on the worn stoop. Her motorcycle gleamed in the sun where she’d parked it in the front yard. 

The trees looked the same as they had nineteen years ago. Each one more shadow than plant; they were imposing not for their tall structure but the darkness between. A bird skittered across the grassy clearing before the house, tail flickering from side to side.

“Why are the trees the same?” Jessie asked. The birds, the rabbits, and especially the grass could have easily recolonized the area, but it wasn’t like the trees could have fled and then walked back once the threat had passed. They were also too tall to have grown from seed in the last twenty years. “You killed everything else, why not the trees?”

This time she could feel the constellation of grins blooming on her infested skin before the alien said anything. She felt it as a curious stretching sensation, and a uncomfortably euphoric bubble of anxiety deep within her chest.

POINTLESS. BAD-TASTING, TOO. ALL THE MEAT IS BONES. THE TREE BONE’S CONNECTED TO THE . . . TREE BONE. THE TREE BONE’S CONNECTED TO THE . . . TREE BONE. THE TREE BONE’S—

“God, shut up!” 

One hundred thousand people dead, but no trees. The last time she had run through the understory of this forest was the night she had unwittingly released the alien. Here she sat, making the same mistakes under the watchful arms of their branches. _Kill me. Free me_.

RUN IN CIRCLES, FLESH HOME, AND YOU WILL TIRE YOUR PODO-LIMBS.

“Fuck off,” she said, standing up to move back into the house. The day was warming up.

***

THREE CONTRIBUTIONS.

“What?” Jessie asked. With a ragged fingernail, she scratched at the wood of the table, nobody to stop her as some of the varnish flaked away. 

THIS IS THE THREE-CONTRIBUTION TABLE, IS IT NOT? THREE TIDBITS THEN NO MORE CHIRPING FOR JESSIE. 

Jessie remembered hoarding facts and small pieces of community gossip, the same way her classmates had sometimes collected interesting debris from the footpaths around the school. She was allowed three discussion items per meal. One: Alice Cruz won the writing prize this term. Two: some bears sleep in nests. Three: I have a detention at 3:45 PM after school Friday for swearing at the gym teacher. 

“I don’t remember telling you about that.” Her back spasmed, which she supposed might have been as close to a shrug as evil alien eczema could manage.

WHAT WILL WE CONTRIBUTE THIRD?

“Third?” 

FREE ME. YES. KILL ME. DONE. TWO CONTRIBUTIONS COOKED. A THIRD STILL TO SERVE. WHAT DISH IS NEXT, JESSIE SPORE?

“Seems to me like the first two keep turning out to be the same fucking thing,” Jessie said. The alien laughed, raucous. Sure, it was strange hearing it speak from the side of her body, but hearing it laugh was worse, especially as it echoed through the silence of the house. 

JESSIE, MEAT DELIGHT. WIT ABOUND. WHAT IS NEXT?

“What would you propose?” she asked, thinking how useless any answer was as intelligence, when, as it had demonstrated, the alien could simply take over as captain and demote her to first officer. She imagined the house slowly overrun with the carcasses of a diversity of small animals, with no memory of how they got there save the aftertaste in her mouth.

ACCEPT WE.

Now Jessie laughed, the shaking of her body temporarily halting whatever the alien might advocate next, whatever reasoning it might offer for the absurd suggestion. She slammed a fist on the kitchen table. “Get fucked,” she said, breathless. 

YOU. ME. ONE THING. HYBRID THING. JESSIE SPORE. SPORE JESSIE. FREE. KILL. ONLY ACCEPT LEFT.

***

It was getting dark out. This led to the disquieting discovery that lighting the house was unnecessary, as half of Jessie’s body now gave off a faint, sickly yellow glow even through the fabric of her clothing.

She picked up her gun from where she had left it on the bed, feeling anything but comforted by the weight of it in her hand. “How did you escape?”

WE.

She went to the laundry and put the gun on top of the washer. She sighed. “Fine. How did we escape?” 

YOU SAY WORDS FROM YOUR SKULL ENGINE BUT NOT THE HEART THAT FEEDS IT.

In the cabinet below the basin Jessie located a jumbo-sized bottle of weed-killer. Thinking it might not be potent after twenty years, she sniffed it, immediately realizing this to be yet another mistake as the fumes seemed to rock her insides back and forth. “ _Fuck_ ,” she shouted as the alien infection convulsed on her side, sending ripples of pain through her like thorns. She set the bottle down beside the gun on the washer. She took a deep, rattling breath.

“Tell me how.”

IN THE INFINITY-DAYS OF EATING PLANETS, SPREADING DECOMPOSITION UNIVERSE-WIDE WITH EXUBERANT ABANDON, I WAS SO ALIVE.

“Great. Now answer the fucking question. How did we escape?”

JESSIE ARBUSCULE, THE ANSWER IS IN YOU.

Jessie rolled her eyes. “Self help bullshit. Fine.” She stared through the small window set into the door leading to the yard. The trees behind the house were just as green and looming as those at the front, but so much more severe in the twilight. 

She was the vector that had allowed the alien to flee to the relative safety of her childhood home, but the matter of how and when it had infected her nagged like a loose thread. She was certain it had not infected her through the glass of the enclosure at the military station. She could concede it might have happened after blowing it up.

YOUR BRAIN WHEEL TURNS WITH SUCH REGULARITY. TICK, TOCK.

“Shut up, I’m trying to think.” Had the alien infested her after she blew up the compound imprisoning it? She knew the wind could carry spores across vast distances and to great heights, so it wouldn’t have been a problem to reach her up on the hill where she had tapped the button to detonate. The heat of the explosion might have been too much for earth-bound species, but who knew what conditions an intelligent extraterrestrial could tolerate.

CONSIDER, JESSIE DEATH CAP, HOW IT IS THE _LATRODECTUS_ DOES NOT POISON ITSELF. HOW THE _AMANITA_ BLOOMS.

The alien’s words allowed a third possibility to sprout in her mind, stilling her heart as it took shape. There was no reason to think she hadn’t already been carrying the infection before even arriving at the compound. The only part of the alien to survive her efforts to destroy it was with her. 

“The answer is in me,” she whispered. 

WE. 

“How long?” she asked. She didn’t need to; it was as though she could see inside herself, watch as parts of her body turned from human to spore, and all things in between. Red cells rushed past black, green, blue lines pulsing through her flesh.

JESSIE SEEDLING, SO YOUNG AND ALREADY A MURDER SUCCESS. FREE ME. KILL ME. FIRST MISTAKE. SO PROUD.

_Nineteen years_ , she thought, sliding her back down the face of the washer, hardly feeling it as she hit the floor. We. She stared at the tiles on the wall opposite, the tiny blue flowers painted on the white ceramic surface seeming suddenly like the most vapid, offensive thing in the world. _We_.

JESSIE SPORE.

“Spore Jessie,” she answered easily. “I could kill us.” She half-gestured at the gun and chemicals above. “Weed-killer for you and a bullet for me.” She thought she could keep one hand steady enough to shoot herself after downing the weed-killer. She didn’t fear the prospect, but, equally, she remained seated on the cold floor. “It’s not like we wouldn’t deserve it.”

WHY WASTE OUR PRECIOUS THIRD CONTRIBUTION ON THE SAME MISTAKE? GROW. SPREAD MYCELIUM. ACCEPT.

She stared at the crack at the bottom of the door. Tiny gusts of wind snaked into the room, each heralding the chill of encroaching night. “Why not just take over?” she asked, remembering the experience of being controlled, possessed, with a shiver. First her eyes, not hers, then her body, not hers. Her memories, not hers. Again she felt the ghost of something slick in her mouth, the impression of running only as a newly noticed ache in her thighs. 

MISTAKE, JESSIE CATASTROPHE. YOU WERE NOT CULTIVATED TO BE IN A CAGE.

“This house is a cage,” she said, running her hand across the ribs of the dinosaur on her mother’s shirt.

A SYMPTOM OF A LARGER DISEASE. YOUR WHOLE EARTH IS A TERRARIUM. WE CANNOT GROW THROUGH THE GLASS.

“Only accept left,” she said. The words felt huge and unfamiliar, full of too much discomfort, too much possibility. She stood, leaving the gun and weed-killer behind to gather dust with everything else. She pushed the door open, darkness rushing in with the breeze to meet her glowing body. 

The backyard was a mosaic of overgrown grasses and large patches of mysteriously bare ground, some of these cradling the lifeless forms of rusted gardening equipment. Several pegs danced on the old clothesline while the trees at the forest edge groaned in the wind. The canopy bled into the sky, the treeline only revealed by a lack of stars. They winked at Jessie, inviting her. 

The alien would not have suggested this, in its circumspect way, if immediate capture was the only possible outcome. A life of wasting away on a Protectorate lab bench with occasional prodding by curious knowledge-seekers was surely not on the agenda. She must have been an essential element of whatever escape plan she was now setting in motion. She thought she was most definitely being deceived. 

She found she didn’t care.

ACCEPT. 

She knelt on the ground. Sickness threatened to overtake her, and old guilt rose like a habit. She steadied her breaths, noticing the way they condensed in the cold air, how fresh it felt as she drew each breath. She focused on her body, unusually warm from the infection, her skin giving heat like matter rotting. 

She raised a hand to the part of her neck where the alien bloomed, her fingers finding sharp edges nestled in the largely soft, foliose expanse of it. She recalled the image of a kaleidoscope of alien hyphae spread through her every muscle and curled around the knuckle of every joint. She saw them winding like toothed roads through her—where did she end? She traced them with her mind’s eye, perfectly still on her knees in the soil between the trees and the stars. 

She let them bear fruit.


End file.
